Welcome to NZADDs. We’re an independent group of academics and practitioners working together to promote dialogue and critical thinking about New Zealand’s role in international development.

Be it through aid, trade, immigration, or environmental policy (to name just a few), decisions made in New Zealand have real impacts on the the lives of people living in poverty in other countries. If we as a country want to help reduce global poverty and tackle global issues we need considered, well-intentioned policy and practice. NZADDs is committed to promoting this.

You can read more about NZADDs on our about page. For contact information see our contact page. Keep scrolling down to read our most recent updates on New Zealand Development Policy.

Welcome to the first ever NZADDs update not written during the previous government’s 9 year reign.

A new government. What does this mean for New Zealand aid? What should it mean for New Zealand aid? For those of you who haven’t already done so, read Jo’s piece on how New Zealand aid can be renewed. You’ll also be interested in her blog post on what NZ’s political parties were promising prior to the election. (Note that NZ First removed their aid policy statement from their website sometime after Jo conducted her review.)

I’ve just written a post on what needs to change. You can read and comment on it at the Devpolicy blog.

There is a lot that could be done to improve New Zealand’s government aid programme. There’s also no guarantee that the current coalition, with domestic priorities, and three different parties, will do this. Now, more than ever, we need to be pushing for change.

Would you like to know where NZ’s political parties stand on development issues? Jo Spratt has done the groundwork for you. Her analysis is below. It has also been published on the Devpolicy blog. You can read it and comment on it there. Jo’s also blogged her take on what a responsive agenda for New Zealand’s development efforts would look like. You can read this here.

Have you ever wondered what causes high-level aid policy to change in New Zealand? If you have, Jo Spratt has kindly blogged some answers for you, all based on her soon to be finished PhD. Read about the importance of individuals in driving change here, the importance of ideas based networks here, and the role of the rules of the game here.

First, in one of those coordination failures that the aid world is infamous for, we managed to publish the last NZADDs update moments before Peter Adams, a former head of the New Zealand Government Aid Programme, published his assessment of the McCully years on Stuff.co.nz. Peter was head of the aid programme when McCully first became foreign minister and his vantage point has afforded him considerable insight. You can read his take here. Highly recommended.

Second, last week was budget week in New Zealand. That meant hours of my life lost to spreadsheets — all in the name of finding out what budget 2017 meant for New Zealand aid. What follows is my take. This was first published on the Devpolicy Blog. Please read it, and comment on it, there.

In the last update I promised more on Murray McCully’s legacy. I’ve written about this now on the excellent NZ foreign policy blog Incline. There’s lessons for all of us from McCully’s tenure. Here’s the Incline post.

The end of an error, or two: Murray McCully and New Zealand aid

Murray McCully’s time as New Zealand’s foreign minister is at an end. On 1 May he’ll be replaced by Gerry Brownlee. It’s hard to know what Mr. Brownlee will mean for New Zealand’s aid, but it’s easy to assess Mr. McCully’s legacy. He brought change, and he claims to have brought development when before there was only pseudo-expertise and waste. But the changes he made were either unneeded or harmful, and the development achievements he claims either haven’t occurred or can’t be attributed to him.

It’s Murray McCully commemoration time in the New Zealand media. We’ll have more to say about his legacy in coming weeks. But for now as a public service in the name of accuracy, I’ve prepared some charts to help in assessing the changes the minister wrought.

As the years since 2008 have shown, New Zealand needs a sustained, coordinated civil society voice that campaigns for better aid. In its absence, when the going has been tough, asithasinrecentyears, it is hard to effectively oppose changes for the worse. And even when the going isn’t so tough, a campaigning voice would help press for improvements.

New Zealand’s NGOs care about good aid, but it’s hard for any one NGO to speak in a concerted, ongoing way without risking its government funding. A peak body could do what individual NGO’s can’t. New Zealand’s peak body for aid NGOs is the Council for International Development, but it has always been heavily dependent on government funding too–funding which was slashed in 2010, leaving it capacity constrained (and still dependent on the government for over half of its income).

New Zealand needs a sustained, coordinated civil society voice that campaigns for better aid. And it could have one–if New Zealand’s aid NGOs were willing to devote a fraction of their revenue to the task.